


Seven Bottles

by Im_a_huge_fan_of_coffee



Category: The Hobbit - All Media Types, The Hobbit RPF
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Don't dream it's over, M/M, Tragic boys being tragic, aidean, beach angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-31
Updated: 2018-07-31
Packaged: 2019-06-19 16:54:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,963
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15514305
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Im_a_huge_fan_of_coffee/pseuds/Im_a_huge_fan_of_coffee
Summary: Aidan heard a myth once. Seven years to replace all the cells in the human body. He frowns at his hands and wonders if that equates to him never having touched Dean at all. How can it be fair that if no part of his body knows him now like Aidan knew him then, that it still hurts as much as it does?





	Seven Bottles

**Author's Note:**

> Right - I don't even know what happened here except *wine*. I was never going to write a one shot and then... I fell.
> 
> I fully blame the boys for being so freakin' tragic and Ben Howard for writing Seven Bottles (from which the fic takes its name.) 
> 
> I absolutely apologise for this. @marigoldvance - I am holding you responsible for this seeing the light of day, and I hope you're happy.

The stones shift under his splayed hands and Aidan finds himself falling, a slow tilt toward the mound of dark granite stacked in a careful pile underneath him.

 

Anything to keep off the fucking sand.

 

He knows from experience how it clings, how it follows him back to his room and lingers for days, crunching under his feet until the cleaners finally come and sweep away the traces of his misery.

 

He catches himself just before he ends up on his back, but the quick jolt turns his stomach and Aidan tastes alcohol in his mouth all over again. The second-hand beer is warm and sour, and his eyes water as he wills it back down. He sits up, wipes the the grit from his palms and rinses out his mouth with a fresh gulp from the bottle wedged between his knees, this one with a chaser of cold salt air and the last draw of his Marlboro.

 

The evening is draped in shades of dark, from dusk to black. He shivers, wishing he’d thought to bring out a jacket. He makes do with pulling his thin sweater around himself more tightly and tries to ignore the uncomfortable stiffness at the back of his thighs where the wet rocks have been seeping into the denim. 

 

He could leave. Twenty minutes and he could be in the pub with the others, but it’s not even a real option. He knows they’re there, laughing and warm in the small, bright room; but he might as well be a million miles away.

 

They go through the charade every time but he’s pretty sure it won’t be long before they stop asking altogether.

 

_“Coming with, darling?”_

 

He plays the game, always the reluctant decline.

 

 _“Got a couple things to do first, you know?”_ He’ll rake a hand through his hair, flash a sheepish grin. _“I’ll come over when I’m done, if you’re still there.”_

 

At first they say it’s sweet that he works so hard, but by now he’s certain most of them assume he’s thinks he’s just a little bit above it all. The truth of it is that being so empty makes him feel so tired, and he’s tired of being tired of it.

 

Even if he wanted to tell them, what would he say?

That there was a boy and now there isn’t? How can he tell them that he counts time in increments of being apart?

 

His own private calendar, reminding him of how far he’s drifted. The way he can measure everything that happens in his life against the moment he met just one person, an irreversible cosmic collision.

 

BC, AD.

 

Before Chaos, After Dean.

 

So instead he’s here. In the dark, on his own.

 

Again.

 

Aidan on the ropes.

 

* * *

 

 

He drains the bottle, flicks it onto the ground to join the rest and stands too quickly. He sways lightly, the beach shifting beneath his feet like the waves.

He rams another smoke in his mouth, lighting it quickly to help him stay awake. He always says he’s giving up but then what good has giving anything up ever done him?

 

For a minute he panics, thinking perhaps he’s forgotten to bring one, but then he finds the marker pen buried in his back pocket where it always is. He fishes out a folded wad of paper from the other, lines he’s supposed to be learning. It’s crumpled from where he’s been sitting on it; damp too, but he’ll have to make do.

 

The paper comes apart in his hands, long ragged strips torn from the page. He sets them carefully on the ground with a stone to weigh them down, shoving aside a clump of seaweed with his boot and getting a faint waft of sulphur up his nose for his efforts.

 

He keeps the last piece back, smoothing it along the long bench of his thigh. He flicks the cigarette away, intent now, uncapping the pen with his teeth and scrawling furiously on the paper, eventually holding it up to the sky and squinting in the dark to inspect his handiwork.

 

**_Do not read – unless you’re Dean O’Gorman (you fucking bastard.)_ **

A laugh slides out, a drunken giggle that would have earned him a kick on the shin in previous times.

He should probably scratch out that last part but it’s too late now. He flips the strip over, writing big, bold letters on top of the torn up lines.

**_Tu me manques._ **

****

That’ll make Dean laugh. He can see him now, the soggy note in his hand, nose all crinkled and half-moon eyes to go with his smile. He remembers that time they gave an interview for a French magazine, and how Aidan had tried and failed to hold it together when Dean had bashfully introduced himself to the reporter. Accents, sure; but languages have never been Aidan’s strong suit and it had seemed funny more than anything else at the time. He had laughed, Dean had blushed, and Aidan had teased him for it all night.

 

He’s learned a lot since then. Stupid foreign books late at night, monotonous podcasts on countless long flights. It doesn’t change the fact that so much of _I miss you_ seems lost in translation to him now that he’s read up on what he can _._

_Tu me manques_. You are missing from me.

Like Dean is an arm, or a leg, or the other half of his heart. The secret ingredient, without which makes nothing mean anything any more.

 

He snatches up a bottle from the sand and dips his tongue into the opening to lick at the foamy dregs.

He rolls the paper up tightly, shoving it into the neck with a dull pop, and throws it back on the beach so he can pick up the next blank piece.

 

 **_I always think about you and that fucking song. You only loved it because it only has about three lines, and we both know you’re shit when it comes to remembering words to music. I can even hear you still, singing_ ** **“Why don’t we do it in the road?”**

**_Well you know what? We should have done it in the road. We should have done it everywhere. I can taste your skin, Dean. I can taste you in my mouth, even now._ **

 

He sits back down and stares at the water for a long time. The night is so gentle. The sky is just off-black, thrown into marbled slates and violets by the shuddering crescent moon. It feels like it might come apart around him, all of it too delicate to be contained by someone as destructive with beautiful things as he is.

 

Maybe he should have loved Dean more like this.

 

It wasn’t soft hands and slow lips. It was knuckles and knees and teeth. It was never quiet. He wasn’t, anyway. Always too quick with a joke or a laugh or a sly word up against the soft hairs at the back of Dean’s neck. He should have listened to the in-between more often. Taken the time to understand what it had all really meant.

 

Dean did, with his calm voice and his deep way of listening. The way he’d watch Aidan walking, sleeping, talking.

Always watching.

 

Dean always saw things where Aidan couldn’t. He’d point them out in breaks on set: Insects, clouds, shafts of light and the faintest touch of blue were Aidan only saw grey sky.

 

He’d take photos of Aidan, and Aidan would groan and whine when he saw them. Pick them apart, all the worst parts of himself captured for every one to see. But Dean – Dean would show him, the light here, and - look, see? The way your eye is in shade? The way it makes you seem so— he’d say, and suddenly Aidan would think that maybe, just maybe he could see a part of what Dean saw when he looked at him.

 

 ** _I couldn’t help falling in love with the way you love the smallest of things,_** he writes _. **I just never expected to fall in love with you.**_

 

Had Dean known it couldn’t last? Aidan hadn’t. When the realisation came, it hit him like a truck; swept them both up in the wreckage. Maybe it was a surprise to Dean, too, but he supposes now he’ll never really know for sure. Aidan had always thought Dean had looked sort of hopeful, but maybe in hindsight it was just the first hint of what might lie beyond their time together settling somewhere behind his eyes.

 

The next note comes faster and more furiously.

****

**_Did you know that the most remote place on earth is called Point Nemo? Not because of the fish, dipshit. I can see you thinking it. It’s Latin. Nemo means, ‘_** **no-one.’ _It’s not even a point, really. It’s just a carefully calculated dot in the middle of the sea, as far from land as you can be on all sides. Did you know if you were there, chances are you’d be closer to the astronauts passing overhead in the ISS than you would be to any person on Earth?_**

**_I think about that a lot._ **

**_That’s how it feels, since I messed this up._ **

 

If the bottles end up anywhere, it’s there. They’ll never reach Dean. Aidan would probably die of embarrassment if he thought they ever really could. At any rate it would be years, decades even, before they did.

 

The currents, he knows, are problematic. He’s looked it up, traced their patterns with his fingers until he knows them by heart. The chances of getting past the equator are pretty much up in the air. There’s as much probability of the bottles heading south as there is of them being swept up and across the Atlantic to the Caribbean, before the Gulf Stream brings them right back to his feet again. A gyre, he read somewhere, that’s what it’s called. Round and round and round, never really going anywhere at all.

 

Still. Maybe they make it. Something in life has to beat the odds, he reckons.

 

He likes to think of them floating down there in the South Pacific. The clinking glass cases of his aquatic library, with only whales and chunks of burning spacecraft for company. The strangest collection of love letters ever written.

 

* * *

 

 

**_I know you probably kept asking yourself how I could do it, how I could just shake you off like that. Well, I was wrong. I always hoped, deep down, that you knew I couldn’t really go through with it. I wasn’t trying to test you, Dean. I just thought... I thought maybe it was for the best._ **

**_But you... you’ve shrugged me off like a blanket you didn’t need any more. You’ve always been such a together person. You didn’t need me to hold your pieces in place. Turns out that I was just an extra layer for you to carry around. Not like me. You were the thread holding me together. The thing is, Dean; when I broke us, you turned away, and under her hands you became whole again, but I? - I cracked, and everything that came pouring out was you. You’ve seeped so deep inside my soul that I don’t know which parts are you and which parts are me any more, and the truth of it is that every day I feel like I’m bleeding._ **

 

It’s nobody’s fault but his own. Not Dean’s. Not in the beginning, anyway. Aidan could have left things the way they were, but he was just too much of a control freak to let things slip away slowly. This thing between them – it’s the only time in his life he’s felt uncontrollable, uncontrolled.

 

Regret. He’d regretted it immediately. Of course he had. It wasn’t like he’d stopped loving Dean. He was only trying to preserve _something_ of them _,_ somehow. Or something of himself.

Maybe he always was the more selfish of the two. Losing Dean’s love inch by inch would have been like watching his bones turn to dust. Better to go fast, to rip off the bandage. White pain like the crack of a whip and a chance to rebuild themselves from the pieces left behind, instead of a slow decay that will ruin them both.

 

* * *

 

_“So that takes us up to September. What about the tenth?”_

 

_“I can’t, my shoot doesn’t finish ‘til the nineteenth.”_

 

_“But I’m stuck in Cornwall from the week before that,” Aidan groans. He tucks the phone under his chin, curls himself around his knees._

_“Alright, well, maybe if I cut my October exhibition short? I know Germany isn’t exactly convenient for you, but I’m sure I could fly over for a day or two before I have to be back home, if you can squeeze the time off?”_

_“I won’t have you missing out on your own opportunities for my sake.” Aidan squeezes his eyes shut, tries to ignore the throbbing pain at his temples. “This is important to you, and so it’s important to me.” He throws the calendar on the floor, letting the pages scatter uselessly. “Christmas, then?”_

_The pause is too long._

_“I can’t,” Dean whispers, shaky voice and shaky connection. “I promised Brett that I’d—”_

 

_“You know what we can’t do? This. We can’t do this any more.”_

_The silence is deafening. Aidan’s blood thrums in his ears and it’s hot, hot, hot._

_“What?”_

_“You heard me.”_

_“I heard you, but I’m pretty sure I don’t know what the fuck you mean, Aid.”_

_“You know exactly. And you know why this isn’t going to work.”_

_“We can’t, or you won’t?”_

_Aidan sighs down the phone, forehead pressed against the cold wall._

_“Same thing, Deano.”_

_“Not even a little bit.”_

* * *

 

He doesn’t even understand. He doesn’t have one good answer for the questions the beer makes him ask of himself. Seven bottles full of _why_ and _how._

 

Aidan can’t say he loves hard work, but he’s good at it. He’s not a quitter. He’s always thrown himself into everything he’s ever done, seen it through.

 

But this; him, Dean, them... he told himself it was better to remember them as they were, too bright and destined to burn. He’d leapt from the building before the fire had even been lit.

 

_“You and me, Dean. It’ll never last. We were... I don’t know, stupid to think we could get through it. It won’t end, this being apart. There will be no end to this. The distance will always be too much.”_

 

And it is far.

Fuck, it’s as far as he can be from him without launching himself into orbit. But how he ever thought that breaking it off and leaving Dean firmly in the archives of his love life would work, he has no idea.

 

Maybe he thought Dean would never really stop coming after him. The way at night Aidan would roll away, only for Dean to follow seconds later, pressing himself even more tightly into Aidan’s lines and angles until they fit together again. Dean _always_ finds him, no matter how many blankets and pillows Aidan pretends to barricade between them. Rolling his eyes with a smile, and telling him to stop hogging all the space.

 

What he wouldn’t give for that now.

 

Aidan pushed him away, and Dean never came rolling back.

 

* * *

 

_**Can you feel it? The way your skin was on fire that day? I can. It’s like a scar that won’t heal. I’m** _ _**afraid I’ll always be this way, that I’ll push you harder than either of us can stand. That I will look at what we have and want to break it, for the fear of it being to beautiful.** _

**_  
But you have to let me try, Dean. Please._ **

He heard a myth once. Seven years to replace all the cells in the human body. He frowns at his hands and wonders if that equates to him never having touched Dean at all. How can it be fair that if no part of his body knows him now like Aidan knew him then, that it still hurts as much as it does?

 

What he can’t understand is how long it took him to realise he had to put it right. How he let so much time pass that he missed the fucking boat altogether.

He remembers L.A. The lunch they never ate, food picked at on plates in front of them. Dean won’t even take off his sunglasses and Aidan wants to know if it’s because he can’t bring himself to look at him, or can’t bring himself to look away.

 

_“So exactly what was it that you wanted?”_

_“Deano... you have to know, come on—”_

_“You made it quite clear what you wanted me to know, Aidan.”_

Aidan. Hearing him say his name that way, not the hundred and one stupid nicknames they have for each other. The first and deepest cut.

_“I need,” Aidan says, “I need to tell you something.” Of course Dean is sore. Why wouldn’t he be? But Aidan can do this, he can fix this. His hand steals across the table, closes the gap and finds Dean’s forearm. The sprinkling of gold hair feels the same, rough under his fingers, and Aidan wants to turn his wrist up to the sun and kiss and kiss and kiss it._

_“It’s fine,” Dean mumbles._

_“It isn’t.”_

_“Either way. I’ve got something to tell you, too.” He straightens up, glances backward over his shoulder. “You remember Sarah, don’t you?”_

_There’s talk of a ring, of the girl. At least, Dean talks. Aidan doesn’t hear any of it, just tightens his grip harder around Dean’s arm until Dean’s skin whitens under his fingers and Aidan feels like his palm is searing, so hot that it makes him flinch._

_Nuclear fission. Fragments of themselves, scattering onto the table, the subatomic wreck of everything they were, are and could have been, falling._

_“I think, bro,” Dean says, and for a second Aidan thinks he sounds sorry, until he realises that he is only feeling sorry for Aidan, “that maybe it’s best if you move your hand.”_

 

* * *

 

He gets it, at last. It isn’t Point Nemo that’s the most remote place on earth. It’s the spot where Aidan stands, the immeasurable distance from Aidan to where Dean is. To the place where _us_ became _him_ and _me._

He takes the time he’s wasting on Dean and tries to channel it into work instead. He hits the gym hard, works on his body until it hurts and the pain in his muscles is greater than the one that has taken up residence between the bones of his rib cage. He watches himself changing shape. Harder, bigger, faster, stronger.

 

Smaller. Smaller. Everything seems so much smaller without Dean.

 

He tries again, redoubles his efforts to make good on how he told himself things needed to be. A life without the sun, but he’ll be damned if he can’t learn to enjoy living in the shade all the same.

 

He cleans up his eating. Even starts on the motherfucking salads, for god’s sake. All the green smoothies he can get his hands on.

 

Funny thing, though.

 

It turns out spirulina can do a lot of things, but curing heartbreak isn’t one of them.

 

The worst part of it is, they do still talk. Aidan can see it so clearly. Dean settling himself in at his desk. It’s neat, but relaxed and homely in a way that Aidan’s own could never be. There’s lenses and filters in cases here and there, photos scattered across the walls in front of him. Coffee by his elbow and sliced - never mashed - avo on his toast.

 

 _“Fuck,”_ Aidan crows into the sky, _“I even know what colour you like your toast to be, you little prick. Doesn’t that count for something?”_

 

Dean’s desk, which for all Aidan knows is the only place he goes to think about Aidan now. So much more personal than Aidan’s own, which is apocalyptic while he’s at it and more barren than an Arctic winter when he isn’t. He can tell from the way Dean shapes his words that it takes him a long time to write the emails. Always friendly; chatty in that clipped, down-to-earth way that Dean has, even with him. Kiwi-cool.

 

Aidan reads them at night, when he has time to hide red eyes; then he reads them again to search between the lines. He looks and he looks but he never finds it, no chink in Dean’s armour, no bones thrown. Aidan might have turned the page, but Dean has closed the whole damn book.

 

 ** _I hope you’re happy,_** he writes. **_Please. Do that for me, at least. Please be happy._**

 

* * *

 

He’s ready. The bottles are loaded and waiting. He places them side by side, slowly. Methodically.

 

Have to get it just right.

 

He tastes salt, wild sea air on the tip of his tongue where it’s poked out from between his lips in concentration. There – wait. That one isn’t quite level... now. A perfect line, the empty green glass alive and flickering with the movement of the water behind it.

 

Seven bottles.

 

One for each of the years he’s known and loved Dean. Half as many as the number of times he’s been inside him, slick skin on slick skin and Dean’s broken voice, listening to his own name like a prayer in his ear, the only religion he’s ever believed in.

 

One for each of the days since he’s last done this.

 

He tells himself it’ll be the last time, every time, but it isn’t, and it won’t be. It comforts him as much as it frightens him. The way the beach is waiting for him every time, folding him and his sad drunkenness up between the crumbling, rocky headlands like familiar arms.

 

Fuck that. Not the beach, _his_ beach. The thought makes him smile. The king of Cornwall by night.

 

It’s empty here after dark, now that summer is over and the air is getting cooler by the day. Someone in makeup told him it’s a naturist beach, actually, and that made him laugh. He could take his clothes off too, he supposes; go for a swim, but he’s never quite got that wasted. That’s what everyone wants these days though, isn’t it? A bit of his skin.

 

Everyone except Dean.

 

He wonders sometimes how he makes it back to his room, given how sketchy the climb back to the top can be even when he’s stone cold sober. He likes the nights when the low spring tides let him walk all the way to Pedn Vounder, even if he’s found himself cut off on the sand bar more than once and ended up wading back to the path, trudging home soaked and more heartsick than ever.

 

Still.

 

Those nights are the only time he lets himself feel the sand between his toes, and he tries to imagine a different stretch of coastline at the other end of the world; feet falling on hot sand just behind his as they run a race Aidan was always going to win, and half the beach following them back to the bottom of their bed by the end of the evening.

 

* * *

 

Aidan sticks his hands in his pockets and stares at the stones by his feet. Glares, really. Anyone who found him now might assume he’s waiting for them to say something.

 

Seven bottles is just enough to make him stay awake all night with his thoughts and then want to sleep all day. No doubt tomorrow will see him stifling yawns at work and stumbling into every frame, wishing to god that he’d gone to bed earlier, or at least not done this yet again, but he’ll get by. He always does.

 

The hardest act of all is hiding the shame of loving Dean, and hiding the shame of not screaming his name from the top of every cliff in this goddamn county. He is torn, a rip in the fabric of his being that frays and frays as he picks at it until he’s trailing pieces of himself all over the globe, a red string winding all the way back to a distant New Zealand farm and tangling up far too many people in between.

 

And there have been people in between.

 

He’s always searching in the vain hope that someone might fill the void. Once or twice he’s thought that maybe he could have even fallen in love, could have let himself do it - if only he hadn’t already tasted something so much bigger. A softer, more savage, rarer thing all together. A love like the sky, endless and depthless that he knows he’ll never be free from.

 

Hands. That’s how he chooses them.

The girls with hands the same size as Dean’s, the ones that fit best around his limbs at night. He used to tell himself it was just because it was familiar, but these days he doesn’t even bother lying to himself.

 

He tries to keep it casual, this side of his life where he whispers too hotly into ears in bars and fucks too fast and too indifferently. Tries to keep it quiet. The arseholes in the press are bad enough as it is, but he can’t handle the idea of Dean getting the wrong end of the stick, choking into his orange juice over some blown-up story in the morning papers.

 

Not that he would.

Dean doesn’t care who Aidan sleeps with, that much he’s sure of.

 

* * *

 

 

Seven bottles. Waiting.

 

He takes the first from the line. Left to right, always from west to east, the way he’ll go to Dean if he ever grows the balls to put this right. He flips it round so the weight of it rests in his palm, and then he stands and lets it fly, a high arc over the silent beach until it disappears out of sight beyond the set of waves out in the cove.

 

He waits until he’s sure it’s on its way before he looks back to the row. He’s not in a hurry tonight. Time is one thing he has plenty of.

 

He throws the next, but the neck slips through his fingers before he’s let it go and it shatters on the rocks, a million scattered pieces slide away into the black spaces between. Aidan leans forward and frowns at them, the way they glitter darkly underneath the hazy moon.

 

He picks up a piece and turns it over in his hand, the sharp edge catching on his skin and a bead of ruby blood springing out of nowhere.

 

It’s amazing, really. How one careless moment has removed all trace of the bottle ever having been complete. He couldn’t put it back together if he wanted to. Wonders, honestly, how it ever really fitted in the first place.

 

He sucks the blood on his fingers away, ferric and earthy on the back of his teeth. He kissed Dean so hard his lip split once, and he’d tasted this way then. He’d felt awful, but Dean hadn’t seemed to care at the time. Kissed him harder, if anything, but the morning saw him nursing a purple bruise and Aidan knew it was his fault.

 

Maybe he was always destined to ruin everything he touched.

 

Is he thinking about the glass, or about Dean? Everything is blurred around the edges. Everything but the jagged shard in his fingers.

 

Just as broken as he is.

 

The sea steals up the beach to swallow them up and the next wave arrives expectantly, retreating with a disdainful sigh when Aidan has nothing more to offer.

 

He nods in understanding. The ocean makes more sense to him than people do, these days.

 

An endless hunger, always asking for more.

 

* * *

 

He looks up, wondering if the stars might have an answer, but they only shrug down from the muddled sky. Too old and too wise to be concerned with his insignificant matters of the heart.

 

“Fuck... _you,”_ he grunts as he pulls back his arm and sends the next bottle flying high, this time making it safely out to sea, “...you _fuck_. Fuck you and the way you let her _love... you..._ ” The bottles follow one by one, flares from a sinking ship, leaving him panting on the sand where his heart still beats out from the wreck of his ribs.

 

“I love you,” he whispers. “I still love you, Deano.”

 

He can’t see the bottles any more, but he knows they’re out there, lolling on their sides somewhere behind the break. The tide is heading out, and he likes to hope it’ll take them on their way. He wonders if one of them might even reach home, imagines it bobbing across the Irish Sea to the small beach at Sandycove, but the image fades with his smile when he realises he doesn’t even know where home is any more.

 

It isn’t Ireland. Hasn’t been for a long time. London isn’t so bad, but that’s his house, not his home.

 

The bottom of a bottle?

 

There’s no home there either, but at least with the alcohol he knows where he stands. Sometimes when he drinks more than he can reasonably handle he feels like he’s teetering on the edge of something, telling himself he’ll have just one more to help him grasp it, then one more, until it’s slipped out of his reach and all he’s left with is a grey headache and a heavy, starving heart.

 

The truth is, he’s a long, long way from the only place he’s ever really felt at home.

 

* * *

 

If the hand on his shoulder is what inevitability feels like, then it’s heavy and warm. A tentative pressure, fingers fluttering like fledgling wings, like Dean is aware he might break.

 

Could he be nervous, Aidan wonders?

Dean is never nervous. Not outwardly. Aidan’s hands clench and unclench in the dark, and neither of them speak for a long time. Aidan tries to swallow the tight choking sensation rising up from the centre of his chest, but he doesn’t trust his voice even when it finally comes out in a tired gasp.

 

“I’m sorry.”

 

“There’s time for all that. From both of us,” Dean murmurs. He sounds almost as wrecked as Aidan, but there’s a calm acceptance in his words that prickles at the corners of Aidan’s eyes. “But not now. Just... let it be this.”

 

Undeniable. Ineludible. That’s what they are. Dean’s hand, still shaking on his shoulder. Artist’s hands, always so steady with his camera or holding a brush. A hand with no hint of a ring, only a pale sliver of skin against a suntanned backdrop.

 

He dares to hope.

 

“What are you doing here, Dean?”

 

“What do you think?”

 

Dean smells like home, like familiar things that have been part of the way they lived their life together while it was theirs to share. Like too many hours spent on a plane, a chewing gum toothbrush, Dutch courage and the golden scent of air from far, far away.

 

“But...” These aren’t the things Aidan meant to say. He’s rehearsed this a thousand times, played this out on so many nights in his head. “How the fuck did you find me?”

 

“Little birds,” he shrugs. “It’s not important.” Dean’s hand tightens around Aidan’s shoulder, the tips of his fingers pressing into Aidan’s collarbone. “But you. You are. What are you doing, Aido?”

 

“I’m writing.”

 

“To who?”

 

Dean’s chest against Aidan’s back now, warm inside his jacket and slotting into place like the final piece of a jigsaw that Aidan has been searching and searching for; and everything is slowed, slowing. Right down until Aidan can see time hanging in the spaces between waves, breaking over and over on the dusky shore in time with Dean’s heartbeat against his spine.

 

“To you.”

 

* * *

 

Dean’s hand crosses Aidan’s chest, reaches up and finds his face; his thumb rasping across Aidan’s jaw and wandering along his cheekbone until Dean reaches the crease of his closed eyelid and strokes across the thin skin, the long curve of Aidan’s eyelashes. Aidan can’t help tipping his head back, letting it catch on Dean’s shoulder behind him while he reels with how raw and vulnerable and strange and completely familiar everything is, all at once.

 

Dean’s fingers pull him apart, and Dean’s fingers bring him home.

 

“Do you ever get the feeling that the world knows what it’s doing far more than you or I do?” he asks, more to the night than to Dean. His hands find their way to Dean’s front pockets. He tucks his fingers inside, wriggling into the warm space between their thighs.

 

“Yes.” Dean’s mouth is in his hair, and his words are softly lost into curls and caught there for Aidan to keep. “What is it about you and me, that makes this the only way things could ever have been?”

 

Aidan shakes his head.

 

“It’s like turtles,” he finally blurts.

 

It’s not exactly what he meant to say either, but to his credit Dean doesn’t crack any jokes about late night pizza. Instead he laughs. Quiet, easy and light, and even though he’s standing behind him Aidan can almost see his face. The way his smile will be wide and sort of crooked on one side, pulling back far enough to put the dimples in his cheeks but not so far that he has to show his teeth.

 

“If you say so,” Dean says. “I’m not being Donatello, though.”

 

“That’s not... I don’t mean we— oh, fuck it.”

 

Dean unfolds him, and folds him back up again, chest to chest and feet to feet this time. He waits for Aidan to sort through his thoughts, hands gentle on his back, his waist, his hair; a sweeping tide over Aidan’s body that traces the path of a thousand bottles between them.

 

“It’s magnetic, isn’t it,” Aidan says quietly this time, and Dean pulls back to take all of him in, eyebrows crooked and curious. “The turtles. The way they always find their way home to the beaches they were born on, even after years and years and with all those miles between them. They just know. It’s written in them.”

 

Aidan shakes his head helplessly while Dean’s slow smile lights the night. Aidan is rarely lost for words but they seem scattered now, crumbling amongst the pebbles and sand by their feet. He’s hoped and hoped that their poles aren’t opposite and somehow, as much as he can’t bring himself to believe it, here they are.

 

Maybe it’s just that, then. A force of attraction. Seven bottles, his siren song. The slow, unquestionable tug; how they make their way back together through time and space.

 

Aidan, who could show a fire how to burn, and Dean, who is the only one to have ever been the spark.

 

And when Aidan finally takes Dean’s hand – his hand, still now; takes him back to make their bones shake and sweat pour from deep within their battered hearts, he knows he’s reached his harbour. The sea is restless, somehow victorious behind them; and when Aidan takes his last look from the path before it disappears behind the cliffs he finally understands what it’s always been trying to say.

 

Depth over distance.

And the depth of this, of them? Aidan can’t even begin to fathom.

 

This, the fingers linked through his own, the back of a golden head leading him home through the chilling air. Shades of cold water and blue eyes, navy in the dark. The feeling of collapsing and inflating all at once; an end, and the most delicate, ecstatic beginning.

_Home._ Wherever Dean is. Always.


End file.
